A night of food and wine

Saturday

Mar 23, 2013 at 12:01 AM

TUSCALOOSA | The 2013 West Alabama Food and Wine Festival seeks to bring together some of the finest tastes of the region for one night of wine, feasting and jazz. The charity event will be 7:30-10 p.m. March 30 at the Hotel Capstone.

By Mark Hughes CobbStaff Writer

TUSCALOOSA | The 2013 West Alabama Food and Wine Festival seeks to bring together some of the finest tastes of the region for one night of wine, feasting and jazz. The charity event will be 7:30-10 p.m. March 30 at the Hotel Capstone.“I would like to bring the culinary expertise in Tuscaloosa together,” said H. Peter Schmidt, master chef at the Hotel Capstone. He patterned this party after the Las Olas Wine and Food Festival in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., which he ran for several years before moving to Tuscaloosa in 2011. “We want to taste it all, from barbecue to mom-and-pop to mid-scale to high end, Mediterranean, Indian, whatever. There is no competition. There is no goal of saying I’m the best,” he said. “No, it is to support the Red Cross, bring the community together for a fun evening, and let it be.”Patrons will be able to sample some wares from the newly reopened The Globe, along with The Cypress Inn, DePalma’s Italian Cafe, Evangeline’s, Hotel Capstone, Kozy’s Restaurant, Mary’s Cakes and Pastries, Taziki’s Mediterranean Café, The Tin Top Restaurant and Oyster Bar and Wintzell’s Oyster House.For further tastes of the town, Druid City Brewing Co. will offer Tuscaloosa-born beers, Southern Wine and Spirits will create a martini bar, and Spirts Wine Cellar with Grassroots Wine and International Wines will provide wine pairings.The party will be set up in tents around the Hotel Capstone pool, with a jazz band playing. All of the proceeds will go directly to the event’s beneficiary, the American Red Cross West Alabama chapter, because sponsors including BF Goodrich and Townsend Automotive Group helped front initial costs to get the festival rolling.“The Red Cross will net $5,000 or $6,000,” Schmidt said. “With all the ticket sales, we can tell our customers with a clear conscience that it is all going to the Red Cross.”The Red Cross works 12 months a year, not just in disasters, noted Bev Leigh II, former executive director of the West Alabama chapter, which serves eight counties.“There’s a disaster unit in Walker County as we speak,” Leigh said. He was part of the committee that joined with Schmidt to brainstorm for participants and other details. The plan is to make the Food and Wine Festival an annual event, and let it expand beyond the bounds of Hotel Capstone.“We already have other folks calling us wanting to be involved next year,” Leigh said.Schmidt helped grow Las Olas from a one-day event in March to a three-day weekend street festival in May, building from 17 restaurants to 70, with thousands of patrons attending, all for charity. He brought that experience to the Tuscaloosa version.“We had great brains together, great ideas (in the committee), so I said ‘I’ll take care of the restaurant part, get it off the ground, get the restaurants to buy in to the concept,’ ” he said. Tickets for the March 30 event are limited to 400, due to some venue size limitations.“The future goal is to take this all the way up to where we have it on a park or a street or whatever, where you have several hundred or a thousand people supporting this event,” Schmidt said. “The goal for this year is to set a benchmark from which we can grow. This year (Hotel Capstone) had the space, we have the equipment to support the other restaurants; next year we’ll set it somewhere else.”The attire is business/country club casual, and non-alcoholic beverages will also be available. The price of admission — $55 per individual or $100 per couple — includes a souvenir 2013 West Alabama Food and Wine Festival wine glass. For reservations, call 205-799-0649. Tickets are being sold at Alabama Book Store on the Strip, 205-758-4532; American Red Cross West Alabama chapter, 205-758-3608; Hotel Capstone, 205-752-3200; and Spirits Wine Cellar Lakeside at the Shops of Lake Tuscaloosa, 205-349-0903. If any tickets remain, they will also be sold at the door. For more, see www.westalabamafoodandwine.com.